9700–5500 BCE: (The Third Age — The Onset of the Holocene, Notable Climatic Fluctuations Compelling People Around the Globe to Readapt Their Food-Obtaining S…

9700–5500 BCE: (The Third Age — The Onset of the Holocene, Notable Climatic Fluctuations Compelling People Around the Globe to Readapt Their Food-Obtaining Strategies, and the Independent Invention of Agriculture in Eleven or Twelve Separate Regions of the World — Including at Least Three in Africa Itself, Demolishing the Myth of a Single Near Eastern Origin for Farming): The third great thematic period extended from the start of the Holocene epoch at around 9700 BCE until approximately 5500 BCE. Notable climatic fluctuations ushered in the new epoch, bringing major changes in natural environments that compelled peoples around the globe to substantially readapt their ways of obtaining food. Most significant of all, peoples living in as many as eleven or twelve separate and far-flung regions of the world began, independently and stage by stage, to move from hunting and gathering to food production — from foraging to the deliberate cultivation of crops and raising of livestock. And here Ehret delivers the fact that shatters one of the most persistent myths in world history: Africans of this era, living in parts of the continent distant from one another, were the independent innovators of at least three of those separate inventions of agricultural ways of life. Not one. Three. The agricultural revolution — long narrated as a Near Eastern gift bestowed upon a passive world — was in fact a polycentric phenomenon, and Africa was one of its primary laboratories. The peoples whom European pseudoscience would later declare incapable of civilization were among its earliest architects, cultivating crops and managing livestock while much of Europe was still hunting reindeer on tundra.